Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Interesting. Of course, Sony also does pretty well in the cassette industry with what you're referring to, the Walkman. This is another thing I didn't realize. The Walkman came out pretty concurrently with the rise of CDs, but as you were saying, it's not like you could take a big honk in-home CD player on the road. No. CDs were not portable for a long time. On the EA episode where we interviewed Trip Hawkins, we talked about how famously, Madden was Trip's folly. Of course, he was vindicated and proven very right even though it cost a lot of money, took a lot of time, and ended up being an enormously powerful franchise. That is the story with the Walkman. This is Morita's folly. He single-handedly thought that, hey, we've got this cassette player, but really, it's a cassette recorder and it doesn't have speakers. It's a little chunky, but people can take it out in the world, record stuff, and listen to it on the speakers. I think there's a market for people who want a slimmer, sexier version of that where we throw away the recording capabilities, we get that right out, stop taking up space with the speaker, and attach headphones. All of the marketing people at Sony are like, no, there's no market for that. No one wants to walk around outside in their own little world listening to music and headphones. You concurrently have the engineering saying, but we need lots of power to produce all the sound. It's not really technically viable because we need to produce all this audio so that it goes out into the world. You have Morita going, no, it's going to be low power because we're going to make these amazing low-power headphones. We only need to produce a little bit of sound because it's going to be right next to people's ears. This was a consumer behavior that did not exist in the world that Akio Morita just said, everybody, trust me, let's invest in this. It completely changed human history forever and the way that humans walk around out in the world. It's amazing that it was Morita who did this. This is the kind of stuff that Ibuka usually does. The sentiment on the board and in the company against Morita—Morita at this point is that the CEO of Sony—was so strong that he had to make a promise that if the initial 30,000-unit production run didn't sell by the end of the year, then he would resign from Sony.…

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